Ricky Steamboat

And who would you say... are some of the other greatest professional wrestlers of all time in your mind? Steve Austin,

The Rock, Ricky Steamboat, The Hulk, of course.

It's funny you say that.

We're losing, like, one of them.

If you want our predictions, pay the $10, get in the door at the Lancaster Host, and you can hear them then at 6.30 p.m. on Saturday night.

But the special guest this month, at LCW is the one and only Ricky the Dragon Steamboat.

Ricky the Dragon Steamboat.

If that's not worth the price of admission, I don't know what is.

The guy single-handedly had the best wrestling match, not single-handedly, had, in my opinion, the best wrestling match at a WrestleMania ever.

with the Macho Man Randy Savage, Ricky the Dragon Steamboat in attendance.

Yes.

Yes, that's going to be great.

Yeah.

Yeah, so our opening contest for tonight is a six-man tag, and it's between the Dragon, the Texas Tornado, Kevin Carey von Erich, get my words out, and the British Bulldog, Davey Boy Smith, and they're taking on the Warlord and Powering Glory.

The Dragon is, of course, Ricky Steamboat, but they only call him by the nicknames.

He would be gone by, he would be back in WCW by the end of the year, and at all times, great angle reveal, where Justin Rhodes reveals that the Dragon's back in WCW.

If Sean was still around, he'd wax local about it as well, he'd be able to tell you far more than I can.

Paul River would also be gone by October, he wouldn't quite be in the Hawthorne, obviously, until the year after, but a couple of years after, but he'd be soon be out of there, and War and Power and Glory get their jobber entries, which is always a bad sign.

again,

we talk about it all the time, if this was thingy, if this was EWR back in the day, Scott Keith would say it was perfectly acceptable wrestling.

In April 79, Bockwinkle appeared with Mid-Atlantic Championship Wrestling defending the title against challengers such as Johnny Weaver and Paul Orndorff.

Back in the AWA, Bockwinkle's challengers throughout the remainder of the year included Ricky Steamboat, Bill Dundee, RIP, who just passed away.

We'll talk about that here in a second.

Rick Martel, Bruiser Brody, and Bobo Brazil, as well as old foes such as Greg Gagne and The Crusher.

In September of 79, Bockwinkle returned to Mid-Atlantic Championship Wrestling, where he faced NWA television champion Ricky Steamboat in a title versus title match that ended in a disqualification.

We didn't even mention it.

Let me talk about it really quick.

What an arm drag.

I'll say definitely the best match AEW has ever put on.

But Ric Flair versus Ricky Steamboat is better all day, every day.

And it's not close.

Not even close.

Ric Flair getting frustrated that people are saying that their match was the best match in history.

And Flair saying, when you could do 200 Broadway's every year and... 300 matches a year against somebody like he and Rick Steamboat did.

Then you could come talk to him.

But this wasn't about 300 matches or 200 matches.

But that was indicative, and we talked about the changeover with the talent headed in a more, or the style headed in a more singles-oriented, bigger titles, bigger national names, and now you can talk about from 1974 to 1979, and I did this off the top of my head.

because you could literally list every wrestler in the world that appeared in the Carolinas, but on the heels of Johnny Valentine and Wahoo McDaniel, in those five years, Ric Flair, Ricky Steamboat, Jimmy Snuka, Black Jack Mulligan, Greg Valentine, Paul Orndorff, Ole and Gene Anderson, the NWA champions Jack Briscoe, Terry Funk, and Harley Race, Jay Youngblood, Dick Murdock, Dusty Rhodes, Andre the Giant, Mr. Wrestling Tim Woods, Roddy Piper, and that's just off the top of my head, and that's a short list, especially the big shows in Greensboro, tag team tournaments, Thanksgiving night, the big shows in Charlotte, you would literally see a who's who of everybody from the NWA and in some cases from around the world.

Carlos Colon worked preliminary matches at one point in time in the Carolinas.

With a talent roster like that, you and I could sit down and we would be wealthy people.